Month: October 2015

I’ve spent the last 10 days recovering from the worst jet lag I’ve ever had. I am not sure why, but it’s taken me so long to start to feel normal again. Yesterday was the first day that I didn’t feel sick and tired all afternoon. Still, a bit of jet lag is soooo worth it for the amazing trip we had.

Just for my own benefit, I thought I would summarise how much money we spent. Can you believe that we came home with money in the bank?! We didn’t spend our whole budget ($20,000). It breaks down like this:

Flights: $4,400 (2 x $2,200)

Eurail pass: $1,250 (2 x 1st class, 4 countries, 5 days)

Rental car: $500 (Ford Focus)

Rental car breakdown insurance: $80

Hotels: $4,500 ($220 average per night)

Spending: $6500 ($310 average per day, includes food, shopping, etc.)

TOTAL: $17,230

Which is not bad considering how expensive most of Europe is and how bad the exchange rate was when we went.

I’m not sure if it saved us much money or not, but we used Hotels.com exclusively for all our hotel bookings. We get every 10th night free with them, so I think it was a pretty good deal. It meant that we didn’t have to pre-plan anything – just look at what was available at the time we wanted and select the best for our budget. We got some great accommodation that way.

And the backpack certainly helped in terms of not buying heaps of junk – I didn’t want to carry more weight than I needed to!